An aspect of the invention relates, in general, to communication within a computing environment, and in particular, to managing the rate at which the receipt of data is acknowledged.
A typical transmission protocol requires information, such as a frame of data, to be sent, by a sender, in separate packets. Each packet can include a bit, referred to as a write back bit, that when set informs the receiver of the packet to acknowledge that the packet has arrived. The receiver sends an acknowledge packet to the sender that indicates whether the packets sent since the previous acknowledge have all arrived error free. Transmission of this acknowledge to the sender requires bandwidth on the bus to be consumed while transferring no real data.
This acknowledge bandwidth can be reduced by including a set write back bit in only the last packet of the frame, such that only one acknowledge per frame is required. This reduces the number of write back acknowledge packets to be sent, but causes the entire frame to be re-transmitted, when an error occurs in one or more packets of the frame.